Icybox USB RAID problem

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Paladinz

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Apr 9, 2015
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I've had a 2 x 4tb RAID in an Icybox USB enclosure and an Icybox JBOD USB enclosure that housed 2 drives on my Windows 7 PC for a couple of years but ran out of space on the raid.

I recently purchased an Icybox 4 bay USB RAID enclosure (IB-RD3640SU3) and added 2 more 4tb drives on RAID 5. The drives are 2 x Seagate ST4000DM004's and 2 x Seagate ST4000DM000's.

After copying several files to the RAID it becomes unresponsive or just disappears from the PC until I turn the enclosure off and on again and the Windows event viewer has numerous of the following errors relating to the RAID disk :-

  • An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk5\DR6 during a paging operation.
    The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
    The IO operation at logical block address 27 for Disk 5 was retried..

I've uninstalled the usb devices from Windows and let them reinstall, swapped the USB ports, changed the USB cable, upgraded the PC's PSU to 650W and still had the same problem.

I've tested the individual drives on another PC and there's no drive problems.

The Icybox forum wasn't helpful so having tried everything I could think of I RMA'd the RAID enclosure. The replacement arrived today and I have exactly the same problem as before, though it is working happilly (if a little slowly) on an old, old PC running Windows 10.

My main PC handled the JBOD and 2 bay RAID enclosures with no trouble at all and ran the 4 bay RAID for several hours if the JBOD enclosure was removed, the problem seems to happen when I have both external bays in use.

The PC specs are

Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU: Intel Core i7 4790 @ 3.60GHz 33 °C Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM: 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. H81M-S2H (SOCKET 0) 28 °C
Graphics
2460 (1920x1080@60Hz)
Intel HD Graphics 4600 (Gigabyte)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (ASUStek Computer Inc)
Click to expand...

Does anybody have any idea what the problem is and hopefully how to resolve it?
 
Solution
Ralston18
Clone your Windows 7 drive and remove the original drive.

Then upgrade the clone to Windows 10. You know Windows 10 so the upgrade should be not be too tedious per se.

If the upgrade goes astray you can simply put the original drive back in and try again.

No harm in doing an extra data backup or creating an image somewhere else as well.

Do not immediately start tweaking the upgraded Windows 10 installation.

Simply get Windows 10 up and running on the old PC so your enclosure will (hopefully) transfer files a the expected speeds. That is the primary objective.

Then methodically do the tweaks and personalization configurations you are accustomed to using.



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Try a USB hub with its own power supply vs PC USB power.

Consider an overheating problem within the enclosure.

And something I do not understand: the error code is referencing Harddisk5\DR6.

Drives 0,1,2,3,4,5 (being "six")....

If it is a 4 Bay enclosure - what is "Harddisk5"?

Out of my comfort zone, full disclosure, but always feel that a question can be catalytic.

 
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Thanks for the ideas Ralston18 but I already tried a self powered USB hub but forgot to mention it, it didn't help.

The enclosure has its own fan and monitors temperature and I run it with the door open to allow better airflow so it's not overheating.

The entire RAID is HD5 in Windows but I've no idea what the DR6 means.
 
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No, the drives have been initialized and formatted by the enclosure and are usable (until they stop working anyhow).
 
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Thanks Calvin7 but the ST4000DM000's worked fine in the 2 bay raid for nearly 2 years and the 4 together are working for the past 6 hours in the enclosure on a Windows 10 PC so I'm not sure what to say there.
 
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Sadly its a design flaw in the Icybox as far as I can see, with the door shut there are no vents for airflow, its a sealed box with a fan at the rear extracting air from the enclosure with no intake.
 
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Where did you purchase the Icybox?

Is this the model:

https://www.pccasegear.com/products/38551/icy-box-ib-3640su3-external-4-bay-hard-drive-enclosure

May be an issue with the "thermal controlled fan".

If the Icybox works for awhile and then, once warmed/heated up, then I would deem the unit defective.

Especially if all of the disks are proven individually and collectively (RAID) to be functional.

Should only take a few operational cycles to establish a pattern. Maybe lasts/works longer in a cooler room.

 
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It is that model but as I said it has worked perfectly (for 8hrs now) on an old Windows 10 PC, the enclosure has not been moved, just plugged into another pc. It has transferred over 1TB so far with no errors.
 
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That would be good news then with respect to the IcyBox itself.

My thought is to take a look at Task Manager and Resource Monitor while connected to the old Windows 10 PC.

See what all is going on.

Then, do the same, when the Icybox is again connected to the Windows 7 computer.

May catch what happens if Icybox falters once more.






 
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I had a think about Calvin7's reply and have to wonder if thats not the answer.

I'm transfering the files from my pc to the enclosure on an old pc with USB1 via ftp, so its handling 4 transfers at a time at 2.4MB/s each, when it was attached to my main pc it was transfering at over 100MB/s or with a multi-threaded backup program, not sure of the speed but faster than 10MB/s.

If the drives don't handle raid the sheer speed of the transfers could have overwhelmed them, the sedate 10MB/s they are getting now isn't causing the same problem, but that doesn't explain how they worked in the 2 bay RAID 1 enclosure for so long.

Also on my main PC Windows 7 itself lockes up until I turned off the RAID enclosure (which isn't happening with Windows 10) so I couldn't check Resource Monitor. Maybe I should give in and finally install Windows 10 on my main pc (shudder) and see what happens, I'd just hate to do that and find it makes no difference and then have to reinstall Windows 7 and all my programs.
 
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Well I put the enclosure back on my pc and limited the transfer to 3 files at a maximum of 9MB/s overall, the array started to slow after 6 minutes and locked up within 10 minutes, so as it worked for 10hrs on my old pc at roughly the same transfer rate I guess I have to assume its either my motherboard or windows 7 not the enclosure.
 
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Clone your Windows 7 drive and remove the original drive.

Then upgrade the clone to Windows 10. You know Windows 10 so the upgrade should be not be too tedious per se.

If the upgrade goes astray you can simply put the original drive back in and try again.

No harm in doing an extra data backup or creating an image somewhere else as well.

Do not immediately start tweaking the upgraded Windows 10 installation.

Simply get Windows 10 up and running on the old PC so your enclosure will (hopefully) transfer files a the expected speeds. That is the primary objective.

Then methodically do the tweaks and personalization configurations you are accustomed to using.



 
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Solution
I had a clearout and got rid of all my small drives a few months ago so will have to make some space and repartition an internal drive or go buy a small drive to use. I do have a bootable portable win10usb tucked away somewhere so might try that first if my motherboard will boot off a USB port.

Well, running Win10 off a thumb drive I've spent hours copying TB's of files to and from the RAID array without a single error or problem at 120MB/s - 180MB/s. Looks like I'll be installing Windows 10 if I want to use the RAID.
 
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